From Mayo to Birmingham City, sports lore is rife with powerful hexes. There’s nothing mystical about the dread and self-doubt they can induce
As the new season of Ted Lasso started, I was reminded of one of the show’s stranger storylines. When Dani “Football is life!” Rojas gets injured, his teammates blame the incident on a curse said to haunt the treatment room.
Absurd? Perhaps. But sports curses aren’t just fictional plot devices. Football is fertile ground for stories of mysterious forces, blamed for everything from missed penalties to decades of failure.
Helen Pilcher is a science writer and author of Life Changing: How Humans Are Altering Life on Earth and This Book May Cause Side Effects
